EPA puts Cleveland on the clock to address soot pollution

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a new standard for soot pollution that The New York Timessays will force industry, utilities and local governments — including Cleveland — “to find ways to reduce emissions of particles that are linked to thousands of cases of disease and death each year.”
The agency, acting under a court deadline, “set an annual standard of 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air, a significant tightening from the previous standard of 15 micrograms, set in 1997, which a federal court found too weak to adequately protect public health,” The Times says. The new standard “is in the middle of the range of 11 to 13 micrograms per cubic meter that the EPA's science advisory panel recommended.”
Communities must meet the new standard by 2020 or face possible penalties, including loss of federal transportation financing.
At present, 66 counties in eight states do not meet the new standard, including the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, Houston, St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland and Pittsburgh, The Times notes. The EPA estimates that by 2020, when the rule is fully in force, only seven counties, all of them in California, will still be out of compliance.
The Times says the EPA based its action on health studies “that found that exposure to fine particles — in this case measuring 2.5 micrometers in diameter — brought a marked increase in heart and lung disease, acute asthma attacks and early death.” The agency estimates the benefit of the new rule at $4 billion to $9 billion a year, and the annual costs of putting it into effect at $53 million to $350 million.

Dr. Charis Eng, an oncologist and geneticist who leads the Genomic Medicine Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, is quoted in this Reuters story about an exciting new cancer study.
“The cancer cells were not behaving the way the textbooks say they should,” the Reuters story begins. “Some of the cells in colonies that were started with colorectal tumor cells were propagating like mad; others were hardly multiplying. Some were dropping dead from chemotherapy and others were no more slowed by the drug than is a tsunami by a tissue. Yet the cells in each 'clone' all had identical genomes, supposedly the all-powerful determinant of how cancer cells behave.”
That finding, published online last week in the journal Science, “could explain why almost none of the new generation of 'personalized' cancer drugs is a true cure, and suggests that drugs based on genetics alone will never achieve that holy grail,” according to the news service.
Scientists not involved in the study praised it for correcting what Dr. Eng called "the simple-minded" idea that tumor genomes alone explain cancer.
She tells Reuters that the study is “very exciting" and that the finding “underlines that a tumor's behavior and, most important, its Achilles heel depend on something other than its DNA.” Dr. Eng's own work has shown that patients with identical mutations can have different cancers, Reuters notes.

Looking to sell your house in 2013? While the market is getting better, there are still a lot of pitfalls, so MarketWatch.com offers some suggestions, including one from a Cleveland broker.
Among the tips: learn about the buyer's financing; consider cash offers; prepare for the appraisal; and commit to a tight timeframe.
One section of the piece suggests that sellers “tackle title and inspection issues early on.”
Instead of waiting for the buyer's home inspection to turn up problems, sellers should get one themselves before listing, says Tony Geraci, a broker and owner of Century 21 HomeStar in the Cleveland market. That way, they can make needed repairs before the buyer requests them — or gets scared off, he tells MarketWatch.com.

Matthew Moneymaker, co-host of Animal Planet's “Finding Bigfoot,” shares with USA Today some spots where the legendary hominid may live, and one of them is within an hour of Cleveland.
(To be clear, Mr. Moneymaker, who is president of the Bigfoot Field Research Organization, believes Bigfoot is a descendant of an Asian relative of the orangutan.)
One possible site for Bigfoot spotting? Salt Fork State Park in Lore City, Ohio.
“While some sites downplay their Sasquatch notoriety, this state park has even hosted a Bigfoot conference,” USA Today notes. “Researchers have been coming for decades to this area about 60 miles south of Cleveland.”
Mr. Moneymaker tells the newspaper, "It has been going on there longer than anywhere else. Many people have encounters there.”
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